Engines, including diesel engines, gasoline engines, natural gas engines, and other known engines exhaust a complex mixture of air pollutants. The air pollutants may be composed of both gaseous and solid material, such as particulate matter. Particulate matter may include ash and unburned carbon particles called soot.
Due to increased environmental concerns, engine manufacturers have developed systems to treat engine exhaust after it leaves the engine. Some of these systems employ exhaust treatment devices such as particulate traps or filters to remove particulate matter from the exhaust flow. For diesel engines, the filter is often referred to as the DPF (diesel particulate filter). After an extended period of use, however, the filter material of the DPF may become partially saturated with particulate matter, thereby hindering the ability of the filter material to capture additional particulates and also hindering flow through the DPF.
However, the collected particulate matter in a DPF may be removed through a process called regeneration (i.e., regeneration of the filter). Specifically, a DPF may be regenerated by heating the filter material and the trapped particulate matter above the combustion temperature of the particulate matter, thereby combusting the accumulated particulate matter. The temperature of the exhaust flowing through a DPF may be raised using a flame producing burner specially configured for the particular equipment. One such system is disclosed in commonly assigned US2008/0078172.